Creating a dashboard with Pentaho Community Edition

As the information sources for business executives is increasing, taking decisions is becoming harder. It is for this reason, Executive dashboards are becoming more and more important. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are trying to see how to create Executive dashboards that provide actionable insights to their executives. In the government space, this is even more complex, as many departments and organizations have overlapping mandates that may also be contradictory at times. Executive dashboards provide a way to organize information within the enterprise to focus on actionable information. Open source BI platforms such as Pentaho, offer a compelling option to organizations, who would like to test their ideas before investing thousands in main stream BI platforms.

In this post, we will start the process to create a BI dashboard using Pentaho tools for a multi-perspective multi-organization dashboard. This exercise will go through several steps that involve  multiple technologies. To start off, I will start with creating a customized dashboard look and feel that will house the different KPIs. This I will do in the current post.

Now, in a separate blog post (http://syntharch.blogspot.com/2013/01/quality-of-life-kpis-measuring-human.html), I have started listing Social KPIs and Measures that could be used for measuring a range of social development outcomes. We will build the dashboard using these social measures within the series.

Starting Pentaho BI Server

In previous posts, we discussed installing Pentaho BI Server Community Edition, as well as Community Dashboard Tools on top of it. Let us navigate to the place our Pentaho BI Server is installed and start the Tomcat instance that ships with it.

On my machine, it as follows

> cd Work/Servers/Pentaho/biserver-ce

> ./start-pentaho.sh

Now, once the Tomcat instance has started, we can access the browser to launch the application. For me the URL is http://ub1204.arthgallo.com:8082/pentaho

Logging in the instance with the default username and password, we are shown the familar screen containing the home page. Upon logging in, navigate to the browse panel on the left, right click and select option to create a new folder.

In my case, I am going to call the new folder nydash.

Once created, I want to add a new dashboard page.

Now that the page is created, click on the Save option on the dashboard page. I am going to call it nygov scorecard and save it under the nydash folder.

Now that the dashboard is created, we need to create the bullet graphs that we need. The state government may want to track itself along multiple dimensions, say operational, policy and strategic.

On the Layout section, select the option to Apply a template. We need to click the icon on the Layout Structure to achieve this as shown below.

On the dialog box that pops up, choose the 3 column template.

Clicking on Ok, will give you the following screen.

Clicking on Preview gives us the following display.

We can close the preview. First thing we need to do is to fix some of the UI elements.

For this navigate to the Layout section, and expand the first row and column. Navigate to the background colour property and change it to #003366. Also change corners to Simple.

Next navigate to the nested html element. Clicking on the html element shows the html in an editable colour. Make the following changes

Text: New York State Performance Dashboard

Color: FFEFFF

Save and preview the changes.

Next navigate to Row 3. It will have 3 columns, each of which we will modify as follows.

Color: #EAEAEA

Corner: Simple

Next we update the first column of the last footer row to change the text as follows in the html element.

We also change the settings for the column as follows.

Span Size: 12

Text Align: Left

For the next row, we change it to

Span Size: 10

Height: 40

Text Align: Right

We also update the html to replace the default text with an image from NY gov site.

Lets preview what our template looks like

At this point, we are ready to add some components. We will do this in the next post. In my next post, we will add a bullet graph to the dashboard and customize the look and feel.